Frequency division multiplexing (FDM) is a technology that transmits multiple signals simultaneously over a single transmission path, such as a cable or wireless system. Each signal travels within its own unique frequency range (termed carrier, sub-carrier, or sub-channel), which is modulated by the data (text, voice, video, etc.). Each signal is a series of bits or symbols mapped from (in the case of a transmitted signal) or to (in the case of a received signal) signal constellation. A signal constellation may be represented graphically as a plurality of points spaced form one another on a two or three dimensional diagram, but the constellation itself is merely the assemblage of points spaced from one another in a particular manner.
An orthogonal FDM (OFDM) spread spectrum technique distributes the data over a large number of carriers that are spaced apart at defined frequencies. This spacing provides the “orthogonality” of the OFDM approach, and prevents the demodulators from seeing frequencies other than their own. The benefits of OFDM are high spectral efficiency, resiliency to RF interference, and lower multipath distortion. This is useful because in a typical terrestrial wireless communications implementation there are multipath channels (i.e., the transmitted signal arrives at the receiver using various paths of different length). Since multiple versions of the signal interfere with each other (inter-symbol interference (ISI), it becomes difficult to extract the original information. Discrete multi-tone modulation and multi-carrier CDMA (MC-CDMA) are other multi-carrier techniques. Multi-carrier modulation is stipulated in standards for digital audio and video broadcasting, wireless LANs, asymmetric DSL, and VDSL, to name a few of the wireless and wireline applications already in use.
OFDM has been successfully deployed in indoor wireless LAN and outdoor broadcasting applications. OFDM beneficially reduces the influence of ISI and has also been found to work well in multipath fading channels. These and other advantages render a multi-carrier transmission approach, and especially OFDM, a strong candidate for use in future mobile communication systems, such as one being referred to as 4G (fourth generation).
In a frequency selective fading channel each sub-carrier is attenuated individually. The resultant sub-channel frequency functions are frequency-variant and may also be time-variant, i.e. the channel magnitude maybe highly fluctuating across the sub-carriers and may vary from symbol to symbol. Under favorable conditions, significant amounts of data can be transmitted via the channel reliably. However, as the channel changes in time, the communication parameters also change. Under altered conditions, former data rates, coding techniques and data formats may no longer be possible. For example, when the channel performance is degraded, the transmitted data may experience excessive corruption yielding unacceptable communication parameters, such as excessive bit-error rates or packet error rates. The degradation of the channel can be due to a multitude of factors such as general noise in the channel, loss of line-of-sight path, excessive co-channel interference (CCI), interference from other cellular users within or near a particular cell, and multipath fading, in which the received amplitude and phase of a signal varies over time.
In wireless communications, channel state information (CSI) at the receiver is usually obtained through transmission of a number of known pilot or training symbols to offset channel degradation. Typically, an estimation algorithm at the receiver uses the pilot or training symbols to estimate the unknown channel based on the knowledge of the transmitted symbols. The estimation variance depends on the noise variance, number of the channel components to be estimated, and number of the pilot or training symbols (number of independent measurements). In general, the more the number of channel measurements, the lower the estimation variance will be. For a slowly fading channel where the fading coefficients remain approximately constant for many symbol intervals, the transmitter can send a large number of training or pilot symbols per channel realization without a significant loss in the data rate, and allow the receiver to accurately estimate the fading coefficients. In this case, a system designer can safely use a perfect CSI assumption to design optimal codes and constellations. Prior art signal constellations such as conventional phase shift keying (PSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), which are based on maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance between constellation points, are premised on this assumption. In practice, due to the necessarily finite length of the training sequence, there will always be some errors in the channel estimates. However, prior art communication systems map symbols to signal constellations, such as QAM, that were derived assuming perfect knowledge of channel state at the receiver.
The assumption of perfect CSI at the receiver is especially inappropriate with multi-carrier communication systems. For fast fading channels where the fading coefficients vary too fast to allow a long training period, or for multi-path systems where very long training sequences are required to accurately train all of the possible channels from the transmitter to the receiver, obtaining an accurate estimate of the channel at the receiver may not always be possible.
In fast fading channels, the approach of sending a large number of training or pilot symbols is either infeasible due to the fast variations of the channel, or results in a significant loss in the actual data rate due to the fraction of the bandwidth spent on training. As a result, in high mobility environments, the number of measurements per channel realization is relatively small and the estimation quality is affected by one or both of the following effects:                The number of measurements per channel component is very small, resulting in a larger estimation variance due to the additive noise.        Some of the channel components are not estimated at all (e.g., the paths with small energy in a multipath environment). These components appear as additive terms in the estimation variance, which do not vanish at high SNR and result in an error floor in the performance curves.        
In the presence of channel estimation errors due to the above effects, the constellations that are designed for the case of perfect CSI are no longer optimal. Using such prior art constellations often results in poor performances and high error floors, especially in fast fading environments and long delay spreads.
What is needed in the art is a new type of signal constellation that facilitates acceptable error rates over a fast-fading channel environment where only rough estimates of the channel may be available, especially for a multi-channel environment wherein the transmitter and/or receiver employ multiple antennas. Ideally, advancement in the art is best served by a technique for designing such a signal constellation to facilitate further refinements.